Pitti Palace is the monument in Florence most often visited badly, and the reason is that nobody explains to the visitor what they are buying.
It is not a palace with a museum inside. It is a palace with five different museums inside, spread over three floors, plus a forty-five-hectare park that has a ticket of its own. Anyone who goes in without knowing how it is organised starts on the wrong floor, burns their energy among the paintings and reaches the garden an hour before sunset, when two hours of light are what they needed.
The other thing worth knowing in advance is that the display here is deliberately not modern: the paintings in the Palatine Gallery hang four or five rows deep up to the ceiling, with no prominent labels and no thematic route. That is not neglect, it is a reconstruction of how paintings were looked at in the seventeenth century, and if you know it you enjoy the room instead of hunting in vain for chronological order.
From a banker’s house to the palace of three dynasties
The palace was built in the mid-fifteenth century by the Florentine banker Luca Pitti, in a version far smaller than the one you see, possibly to a design by Brunelleschi. The name has stayed that of the first owner, which is an irony of history, because the Pitti kept it for only a few decades.
In 1550 it was bought by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora of Toledo, who turned it into the grand-ducal residence and moved in, leaving Palazzo Vecchio to the offices. From that moment Pitti Palace was the home of power in Tuscany for more than three centuries: the Medici were succeeded by the Habsburg-Lorraines from 1737, and from 1865, when Florence was capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the House of Savoy lived here.
Each dynasty added something, and the result is a palace that tells the story of three courts laid one on top of another.
The Palatine Gallery, the part not to sacrifice
If you have time for one thing only inside the palace, this is it.
The Palatine Gallery occupies the first floor and was created between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth by the Habsburg-Lorraines, who chose around five hundred masterpieces from the Medici collections and hung them in the state rooms. They have stayed where they put them.
The numbers say a great deal: there are eleven works by Raphael and fifteen paintings by Titian, as well as Rubens, Caravaggio, Andrea del Sarto, Filippo Lippi and Jacopo Pontormo, who left his best work in Florence. It is the museum with the largest number of Raphaels in the world.
The main rooms are called the Rooms of the Planets, Venus, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and were frescoed by Pietro da Cortona for the Medici: the cycle tells the education of the prince as you rise from planet to planet. Look up, because the ceiling is as much part of the work as the walls, and in the rush of paintings almost nobody does.
Please note: the Room of the Iliad and the Treasury of the Grand Dukes are temporarily closed, so part of the route cannot be visited.
The palace’s other museums
The Royal Apartments are on the same floor as the Palatine and are visited straight after. They are fourteen rooms with their original furnishings, and they explain something the paintings do not: how life was actually lived in a royal residence, with the state rooms narrowing step by step into the private quarters.
The Treasury of the Grand Dukes occupies the ground floor, with the Medici’s precious objects, hardstone vases, ivories, ambers and jewels. It is the part currently closed.
On the second floor are the Gallery of Modern Art, devoted to the Tuscan nineteenth century and in particular to the Macchiaioli, and the Museum of Fashion and Costume, the first Italian state museum dedicated to the history of dress.
With five museums in one building the temptation is to see them all. My advice is the opposite: pick two, the Palatine plus one, and spend the time left on the garden.
The Boboli Garden
Boboli is the model of the Italian formal garden, the one European courts copied for two centuries, and it has a separate ticket from the palace.
The Medici began it in the mid-sixteenth century on the hill behind the palace, and the Lorraines and the Savoys extended it as far as the old walls towards Porta Romana. It is forty-five hectares on terraces, with ancient and Renaissance statues scattered along the avenues: an open-air museum, not a park to lie down in.
There are four things to look for.
The Buontalenti Grotto, just past the entrance from the palace courtyard, is the strangest. Bernardo Buontalenti built it as a fake cave, with concretions, sponges and figures that seem to melt into the rock: Michelangelo’s Prisoners once stood in the first chamber, replaced today by copies while the originals are at the Accademia.
The Amphitheatre, the grassy hollow with tiered seating just above the palace, was the open-air court theatre: the Medici festivals were staged here, and at the centre stands a genuine Egyptian obelisk, brought here at the end of the eighteenth century.
The Viottolone is the long cypress avenue that runs south down to the Isolotto basin, a pool with a small island at its centre and Giambologna’s Fountain of the Ocean. It is the part of the garden where the crowd thins out.
The Kaffeehaus, an eighteenth-century green and white pavilion with a dome, is one of the few examples of Rococo architecture in Tuscany and has the best view over the city from inside the garden.
How to plan the visit
The order that works is palace first, garden after, and not as a matter of taste: the garden closes earlier and needs daylight, while the rooms are lit the same at any hour.
Inside the palace, begin with the Palatine Gallery while you are fresh, because it is the part that asks most attention. The Royal Apartments follow on with little extra effort. The Gallery of Modern Art on the second floor is the first thing to drop if time is short.
At Boboli, if you have two hours, do the Grotto, the Amphitheatre, the Kaffeehaus and then walk down the Viottolone. If you have one, skip the Viottolone: it is beautiful but long, and halfway down you realise you have to climb all the way back.
Allow for the slope. Boboli is built on a hill and there is no level route: from the Grotto to the Amphitheatre you climb, and from the bottom of the Viottolone you climb a good deal more.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official website of the Uffizi Galleries, which also run Pitti Palace and Boboli. Prices and opening times change: check again on uffizi.it, and remember that the only genuine ticket office is tickets.uffizi.it.
Tickets. Pitti Palace costs 16 euros bought on the day at the desk and 19 euros booked online, because the booking fee is added to the price. The Boboli Garden has its own ticket and costs 10 euros on the day and 13 euros booked. The palace ticket covers all the museums inside it, not just one.
Current closures. The Room of the Iliad and the Treasury of the Grand Dukes are temporarily closed. If the Treasury was the reason for your visit, check before you buy.
Free entry. Admission is free for under-18s and on the first Sunday of every month, for both the palace and the garden. On free Sundays there is no booking.
Getting there. Piazza de’ Pitti is in the Oltrarno, ten minutes on foot from the Ponte Vecchio going up via Guicciardini. From Santa Maria Novella station it is a twenty-five minute walk. The quarter is pedestrian almost throughout.
How long it takes. Allow two hours for the Palatine Gallery and the Royal Apartments. For Boboli, two hours for the full route and one for the upper part alone. A full afternoon covers both without rushing.
What to bear in mind. At Boboli there is little shade along the central avenues and no drinking fountain at every corner: in summer, carry water. The garden has only one large refreshment point, so do not count on a bar round the corner.
If you want to keep the two queues together, you can book entry to Pitti Palace and the Boboli Garden on a single ticket.
What to see nearby
Pitti Palace closes the second day of the two-day itinerary in Florence, which from here climbs to Piazzale Michelangelo for sunset.
On the other bank, ten minutes away, are the ten works to see at the Uffizi: between the two museums runs the Vasari Corridor, which can be walked today and which comes out right beside the Buontalenti Grotto.
Photo credits. Pitti Palace facade and Palatine Gallery: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0. Buontalenti Grotto: Dimitris Kamaras, CC BY 2.0. Boboli Amphitheatre: Yair Haklai, CC BY 2.5. All images come from Wikimedia Commons.
